.NET developer survive on linux

I’ve been joking with my friends “the open source fan boyz” that I am a Microsoft slave for the fact that I am a dedicated .NET developer. But for all the joke I found some competitive disadvantage for me moving forward. If customer is looking for a low cost solution .NET is not the way to go. Base on what I do for a living, I build desktop and web application in .NET. But I tend to focus more on Web Application which dragged me to ASP.NET MVC.

Let taking ASP.NET MVC to build solution for me it yield a great ROI for me

I got to learn more about .NET library

it still .NET so I can use all the skill I got

got great IDE support => productivity is high so and so …

for clients :/ intranet deploy

invest on the server hardware (normal)

software license just take Microsoft Windows Server + SQL Server hmm

and for Internet deploy ASP.NET hosting generally more expensive than LAMP stack. If I am about to help client cutting down expenditure cost I got to get rid of the underline infrastructure need to run the application. Possible with Mono but I am keep hearing incompatible issues on ASP.NET + Mono.

Anyway let me (us) forget all about ASP.NET glorious day. Recently, I start caught up with a movement in two different communities. Both of them trying to escape from ASP.NET sandbox and they both gave birth to two unrelated open source projects manos and Nancy that the cool part.

These two project promised to free its user from underline infrastructure (no more IIS is required!) and it work x-platform.

Up to this point I can only make manos serve page, I am keep watching and follow-up with Nancy development. I hope to be able to compare advantage and disadvantage between the two projects in the future.

“Nancy start with a full range of view template to choice from, and I do not think it hard for manos to do the same thing”.

Which one is the best? is not really important at this point, what important is when these projects are matured we can use it to build low cost solution for my clients while still enjoy writing C# “YES, it pronounced C-Sharp” :D, but how? Here the spec

Web Application power by [manos | Nancy] + a few open source libraries

Mono 2.8.x or higher

Server OS OpenSuse 11.13

Back-end database name a few open source DBMS

Why OpenSuse? it is mono home’s os, and if you want to get hot-fix on time that the way to go. So let me end this blah blah post with a teasing screenshot!

Hello World from manos running on OpenSuse 11.13 inside VirtualBox, client access from Ubuntu 10.10 if you care about the environment :D

There you go it’s how a .NET developer survive on linux nice hacking weekend everyone!